ESOTERIC PER1PATETICISM. 199 



they could feel at home nowhere else ; and 

 we have known men of business whose feet, 

 when they stopped going the regular hum- 

 drum round, knew no other course to take 

 but to steer straight for the grave. It 

 behooves us to heed the warning of such 

 examples, and now and then to be idle 

 betimes, lest the capacity for idleness be 

 extirpated by disuse. 



The practice of sauntering may especially 

 be recommended as a corrective of the mod- 

 ern vice of continual reading. For too 

 many of us it has come to be well-nigh im- 

 possible to sit down by ourselves without 

 turning round instinctively in search of a 

 book or a newspaper. The habit indicates 

 a vacancy of mind, a morbid intellectual 

 restlessness, and may not inaptly be com- 

 pared with that incessant delirious activity 

 which those who are familiar with death- 

 bed scenes know so well as a symptom of 

 approaching dissolution. Possibly the two 

 cases are not in all respects analogous. 

 Books are an inestimable boon ; let me 

 never be without the best of them, both old 

 and new. Still, one would fain have an 

 occasional thought of one's own, even 



